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mplanchard

5,124 karma · joined April 5, 2019

https://blog.mplanchard.com/
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mplanchard··on LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators
The MTA also has far more stations than any other US system, indeed more than any other metro system on Earth.

The NYC subway has 424 stations. The next highest in the US is the L in Chicago, with 146, followed by DC, with 98.

Seems natural it would take longer, though that is scant comfort to the people who need them. NYC has 133 accessible stations, which is 91% of the L’s total station count.

mplanchard··on LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators
NYC has a lot of money, but this is a huge project, involving continuous disruption to a system that must continue carrying 6 million people per day throughout its completion. The NYC subway has more stations than any other metro system on earth, with 424 stations, of which 133 are already accessible. Hitting 95% by 2055 means around 10/year on average for the next 29 years. While it could always be better, for a system that is over 120 years old, this seems not too terrible to me.

Also, not every subway station is equal. Some see significantly higher ridership than others, or are more critical transfer points, and so can be prioritized to have more impact sooner. It seems like that is what they’re doing.

mplanchard··on Telling a Computer to Do Things
Totally agree, and also this was one of the most powerful aspects of using nix development environments: when everyone is guaranteed to be on all the same (recent) versions of bash, make, awk, sed, and any other system deps, you can confidentially write your scripts knowing the whole team can use them, without having to deal with Mac users’ scripts breaking because their bash is old, or because somebody doesn’t have jq installed, or whatever.
mplanchard··on English: A vs. An
This sounds to me like something a native french speaker would say in english. I feel like most english speakers would respond, “They are vendors,” “Just some vendors,” “It’s some vendors,” or even just “Vendors,” but not “They are some vendors.”
mplanchard··on English: A vs. An
This is often apparent from the sound or spelling of a word, rather than any genderedness in its concept. A chair is une chaise (feminine), and it would be weird for chaise to be masculine. It’s not because the chair is feminine, it’s because the word is. There are some rules that help you figure out the gender based on the word (often what sound the word ends with), but there are exceptions to those rules.

Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).

mplanchard··on Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing
Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills
mplanchard··on How Much Has Trump Made from Crypto? ($1.4B from 2025 Federal Disclosure)
Sorry, do you know what words mean?

> […] the president or any other elected person, their whole job is to serve people. Do what the people voted that person to do by putting aside all personal preferences, belief and ideologies.

I don’t see how you can say that, and then:

> In that regards, I wonder dignity, humility, empathy would have anything to do with governing

Like, those are the traits required to unselfishly serve others. See literally any religion or framework of ethics.

mplanchard··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
Yes of course, anyone who lives somewhere with winter knows that some winters are colder than others. In the late fall when it is time to swap the tires, you don’t know in advance whether the winter will be harsh or mild, but people put snow tires on anyway in places where harsh winters are common.

It would only make sense to require them every winter if the large majority of winters were quite cold. As such, nowhere in the US requires winter tires, but someone else noted that Quebec does. This makes sense, since even a mild Quebec winter will spend most of the time getting below freezing.

I would be very surprised if there were a place that required winter tires by law where the winter does not always get and stay at or below freezing for significant periods of time almost every winter.

mplanchard··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
Didn’t know it was required, but it makes sense, as it is indeed quite cold. Good thing I always have winter tires on in the winter anyway, so I’m not breaking the law when I drive to Montreal!
mplanchard··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
Are there any places that require winter tires by law that don’t have cold winters? I don’t know of anywhere in the US that even requires winter tires, although I think some states require you to have winter tires OR chains.
mplanchard··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
Yes, this stuck out to me, too. I use winter tires in the winter specifically for the snow and consistently below-freezing temps. Are there places people bother with winter tires that aren’t actually cold in the winter?
mplanchard··on The contagion of fear
> If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk?

The answer, if you are a responsible expert in the field, is to convey the range of possibilities and the uncertainty.

mplanchard··on The contagion of fear
nuclear winter doesn’t discriminate based on region
mplanchard··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
Agree the $10 plan is so worth it as to be a complete non-question as to whether to renew whenever it comes up.

Also, super cool link, thanks for the share.

mplanchard··on Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"
I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.
mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
Thank you for sharing an argument. I for some reason was thinking more like medical gore, which I don’t think should be illegal, but I’m sympathetic to your argument re: violent crime. I don’t know that I agree about car crashes, though.

I haven’t really thought about this before, so I don’t know where I’d personally draw the line, if at all, but I understand better where y’all are coming from now.

mplanchard··on The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution
Two decades puts us back to the post-9/11 war on terror era, from which it seems like a fairly straight line to, for example, ICE murdering people in the streets.

So, yeah, political disasters take time to reach their conclusions, and the slide can be arrested at any point before it gets too bad. I think it’s probably correct that we’ve been in the midst of one for at least two decades, if not longer.

mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
Try turning off VPN for the archive link? It worked for me, but I had to turn off the VPN
mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
This thread is so weird. Several people asking why gore should be as illegal as child porn, but with no followup from anyone so far with reasons. I am not trying to be sarcastic in asking why. I am legitimately curious.
mplanchard··on Show HN: Toast, a beautiful by default in terminal IDE
Yes, speedbar, with speedbar-prefer-window set to t

Or use any of the various file tree packages in [M]ELPA

mplanchard··on Show HN: Toast, a beautiful by default in terminal IDE
Yeah, speedbar and dired are built-in. Speedbar by default still opens in a new frame I think, but in emacs 31 there’s a config option to make it open in a side window without any additional tweaking needed.
mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
Im curious, why?

The argument against CSAM is easy: the creation of the content is clearly harmful to the victims, its viewing and distribution furthers that harm, and its availability has the potential to increase demand.

How do we get to a similar place for gore?

mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
The point is more that these images should not be uploadable in the first place, since they are trivially validated against the national DB to be CSAM.

And, from TFA:

> The program The Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.

mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
From TFA:

> The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
The newsworthy thing here, IMO, is that they don’t even seem to be checking images against the NCMEC database

> The U.S. national center shares digital fingerprints with major technology companies so they can scan and remove the imagery. The center’s list is used by Google and Meta, among others. About a third of the images found by The Times were from that list.

mplanchard··on Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
https://archive.is/pdKjA
mplanchard··on I think I hate the internet
Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)
mplanchard··on Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
I mean, the wikipedia on proletariat disagrees with your definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat

The proletariat’s primary economic value is their labor. They do not own the means of production. Having capital is not the same as being able to live entirely off your capital and the hired labor of others.

In Marxist terms, we are possibly the petite bourgeoisie, although I personally always viewed that as being only the small-business-owning or freelance-style non-capital class: i.e. people who don’t live off their money/property exclusively, but who own a business that they themselves must work to maintain. People who “are their own boss” but who still have to work, essentially.

A key point is that the petite bourgeoisie always wants to act like and identify with the capital class, despite not belonging to it. In an era of continuously deepening equality, the petite bourgeoisie would likely be better off identifying more with the proletariat, since the capital class is not itching to let them in.

mplanchard··on Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
Uh, do you think that the labor class is defined by utter poverty or something? The labor class is defined by having to work for their livelihood, which most of us still do, even if we have a mortgage or a nice 401(k) or whatever.
mplanchard··on Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
I don’t necessarily think meta complaints about the HN crowd are productive, but…

Worker proportion of total company profits is at a historic low, but “unions bad” is often the most that the HN contingent can come up with. A lot of it is “I once knew a union guy who was lazy” kind of discourse. The consistency of the anti-union takes reads to me like a lot of well-internalized propaganda. Many people have bought the SV exceptionalism lie hook, line, and sinker.

Just because you’re a few more months away from homelessness than somebody working a different job doesn’t make you part of the capital class.

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